Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

This week for the digital pedagogy workshop we continue our explorations of digital/information/media/civic/web literacies by working with Mike Caulfield’s curriculum, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. Mike has now published the curriculum in an attractive Pressbooks format, which invites further additions and revisions via the Hypothes.is online annotation platform (we’ve explored both Pressbooks and Hypothes.is here in previous posts).

Last week we introduced a central component of the curriculum, the Digital Polarization Initiative, a structured set of practices by which students evaluate claims found in online sources. Students use practices and tools native to the web, such as wikis, tags, links, and annotations, to marshal evidence, enable analysis, and reach at least tentative judgments about the claims they find in online news sources. The practices build various forms of literacy (digital, information, media, web, civic) as well as domain knowledge in particular fields. No matter what subject you teach, there are sure to be numerous opportunities to help your students become more proficient in assessing the information they access online.

We’ll gather again this Friday, February 17, at 1:30 in the Johnson Center space (Abell 102). Join us then or here online.